Marina Warner

Anatomical cabinets, displaying bodies bottled whole or in segments, are gripping artists’ and writers’ imaginations: the Enlightenment’s relish for physical data banks excites awe, fascination and horror in inverse relation to the disembodiment and intangibility of knowledge in the contemporary computerised classroom. A pigmy woman, who died in childbirth in London, where she had been brought to be exhibited, is preserved, in a complete half-section, in the Hunterian Museum. She inspired one of the last, unfinished works of the artist Helen Chadwick, who wanted to restore the unnamed pigmy to history, memory and human status as a person – to personhood, in short. University museums and hospital teaching departments are richly stocked with such specimens: a whole black man in a glass box in Chicago; quintuplet foetuses floating upwards, open-mouthed, like Donatello choristers, on a shelf in the Hunterian. Zarina Bhimji, another artist who, like Chadwick, expresses her challenge to common, unexamined responses through photography, has made a highly enigmatic, disturbing image of a black woman’s breast, disfigured by a hideous slash. This exhibit comes from the forensic archive of a London hospital, where it is used to illustrate the effects of stabbing for the benefit of medical students: but the injury is itself framed by the jagged partition where the breast was severed from the anonymous victim – the scalpel repeating the pincers that appear, for example, in paintings of St Agatha’s martyrdom.’

A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for they were riding saddles of burning nails, and were being lifted in the air by invisible forces and dropped down again onto the points. Walchelin recognised the procession: it was the familia Herlequini, or Hellequin’s rabble, the grim and unquiet crowd mustered by the lord of the dead, about which he had heard many stories.

‘Snatched,’ said the Sun’s headline about the baby stolen three hours after her birth. This is the old word for what the feared raiders of the nursery, the child stealers, the cradle-snatchers, get up to. The Egyptians devised a special god of the lying-in room, the grotesque Bes, to protect women and babies. Bes was squat and ugly and poked out his tongue and his penis to repel intruders: he was a true scarecrow, and he saw off women who were childless, his myth implies, and filled with envy of the fortune that a new life brings. Lilith is the exemplary cradle-snatcher in Judaic legends; she was spurned by Adam when she refused to lie down underneath him to make love and was supplanted by the fertile Eve. Barren and spiteful, Lilith preyed on children; amulets, posies, charms and lullabies warded off her malign spells. The coral branch often worn by the child Jesus in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child is a survival of this pre-Christian Middle Eastern apotropaic magic. The mother in the judgment of Solomon, who steals another’s baby and claims it as her own, presented a threat whose recurrence in history has been neglected.‘

‘Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.’ So writes Adrienne Rich in a poem from An Atlas of a Difficult World, opening an unpunctuated sequence of horrors: lynchings, pogroms, Auschwitz, Berlin, Palestine, Israel:

The French historian Arlette Farge has described coming across a letter, written on linen in a fine strong hand, in which a prisoner, long incarcerated in the Bastille, writes to his wife, affectionately, imploringly; he adds a message, to the laundry woman who will find it among his washing, asking her to embroider a blue cross on one of his socks to tell him she has managed to pass it on. But the document’s continued melancholy presence in the Bastille archive attests to the failure of his ruse.